Emptiness

The ultimate reality in Buddhism is not God, or Being, or Substance; it is Śūnyatā, which is often translated as ‘Emptiness.’ Why does Buddhism take ‘emptiness’ as the ultimate reality? What does Buddhism indicate by the term ‘emptiness’? To understand the real meaning of ‘emptiness,’ one must begin by emptying one’s mind of the negative connotations the word has in the English language. In this regard the etymological explanation of the term Śūnyatā will be helpful. As Garma C. C. Chang discusses in his book The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Philosophy of Hwa Yen Buddhism:

… Śūinyatā is a combination of the stem Śūnya, ‘void or empty,’ and a participle suffix, tā, here rendered as‘ness.’ Śūnyatā is therefore translated as ‘Voidness or Emptiness.’ It is believed that śūnya was originally derived from the root svi, ‘to swell,’ and śūnya implies ‘relating to the swollen.’ As the proverb says,‘A swollen head is an empty head,’ so something which looks swollen or inflated outside is usually hollow or empty inside. Śūnyatā suggests therefore that although things in the phenomenal world appear to be real and substantial outside, they are actually tenuous and empty within. They are not real but only appear to be real. Śūnyatā denotes the absence of any kind of self, or selfhood. All things are empty in that they lack a subsisting entity or self-being (Svabhāva).¹